Young people interested in Rumi advised to learn Persian

A talk on Persian poet and mystic Jalaluddin Rumi, also known as Maulana Rum, along with rendition of his poetry at the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa), enlightened many among the audience regarding his life and works.

For the evening titled ‘An Evening with Rumi and Shams’, Napa had invited a Rumi lover, Farrokh Namazi.

Many among the audience, including this scribe, did not expect the talk would be primarily conducted in Urdu. However, to their surprise, Institute of Business Administration faculty member Zahra Sabri, who moderated the talk, introduced the speaker as a woman of Persian origin who was brought up in Pakistan.

Later, Namazi said her mother would speak to their children in Persian while her father in English. Moreover, her parents would talk to each other in Urdu, due to which she got familiar with the three languages in her childhood. Later, her grandmother helped inculcate interest in Persian poetry in her as she would recite verses of Saadi, Hafez and Rumi.

The speaker said that when she had begun her career in furniture designing, her interest in Rumi helped her keep her spiritual side alive. She added that no matter what happened, she would read poetry for at least one hour every night.

The speaker said Rumi was born in Balkh in Central Asia in 1207 and his father was a religious scholar. Due to some accounts, his father left his homeland due to the Mongol raids and was eventually invited by the Seljuk ruler of that time to Konya, which is in Anatolia, a region of modern-day Turkey.

She said that as Anatolia had been part of the Byzantine Empire, which as known as Rum, Jalaluddin came to be called Rumi.

The speaker said the meeting with mystic Shams Tabrezi proved to be the turning point in the life of Rumi. She added that Shams taught Rumi every secret he had. However, as Rumi could not continue his teaching in Konya due to his association with Shams, the latter was forced by his students and other persons to leave the city. The departure of Shams made Rumi miserable and one day, while listening to a goldsmith’s hammer in a bazaar, he started revolving in a state of trance, which eventually became the Sufi tradition of whirling dervish.

She said Rumi’s poetic works included six volumes of his magnum opus, Masnavi, that had fables carrying deep meanings and a Diwan that was famous for its musical verses. According to the speaker, the poet had composed his poetry to be rendered with music.

To a question about translations of Rumi in English that seemed to not include the religious diction in his verses, the speaker said a famous translation of the Masnavi was actually a translation from another translation meant to simplify the poet so that he could be easily understood, and hence, the translator omitted things related to Islam in that translation so that the American audience could easily comprehend the poetry. The speaker said the young people of Pakistan interested in Rumi should better learn Persian to have access to the treasures of poetry in the language rather than reading translations. She added that for the Pakistanis, learning Persian was easy as they knew its script; besides many words of Persian had been borrowed by all the languages of the country.

The speaker categorically rejected the notion that Rumi’s poetry was not inspired by Islam.

She asserted that the poet had presented lessons from the Quran and Hadith in Masnavi.

She also discussed the huge influence of Rumi on Iqbal as well as great poets of various languages of Pakistan such as Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai and Bulleh Shah. Later, she recited and sang some of the verses by Rumi with accompaniment of the flute and percussion. Explaining some of them, she said Rumi’s was not a depressing poetry as he always urged people to know themselves and purify their inner self to know the true meaning of life.